never shaken
by LittleLongHairedOutlaw
Summary: 1970. Philippe dies 28 years after the operation that saved his life, and as Sorelli learns to live in a world without him, the greatest relief she can find is in writing the memories of the time they had together. (a follow-up to An Ever-Fixéd Mark, Alters Not, and To the Marriage of True Minds)


He dies, and the bottom falls out of her world.

* * *

Twenty-eight years of marriage, and she wakes to find him cold and still beside her. She sees his pale face, brushes back a lock of hair (still blond, streaked grey) and she doesn't need to check, because she knows.

(He's been tired, so tired, but still he smiled for her.)

His heart, the doctors say, after.

There are callers, concerned neighbours, their dear friends, and she cannot speak a word.

Raoul pulls her into his arms, and his face is damp with tears. Christine sits her down and presses a cup of hot tea into her hands. Robert is pale when he makes it down from Dublin, his eyes bloodshot, and he trembles as he hugs her but there is nothing she can say, no words that can fit her tongue, nothing that can take away the fact that his father is dead.

Philippe is dead.

* * *

The funeral is big. So many people, most of them she doesn't know, most of them she doubts he even knew. Politicians and writers and musicians and artists and the press and the normal people, without pedestals, the ones he cared about pleasing the most. (Browne is one of them, caught between politician and normal person and doctor and old friend, and as he shakes her hand it is as if an understanding passes between them, of all that Philippe was, and she musters a twist of her lips, her throat too tight to speak, at his murmured "I'm sorry.") If it were just the family, if it were just the ones who mattered most— but all these others they shake her hand and tell her they're sorry and she wants to scream, wants to tell them to shut up and just go away. And she might scream, but she still can't speak, her throat too tight, her tongue too numb, the hollowness inside her chest swallowing all words, all sound except, he's dead.

He's dead.

"He's dead." And it is wrong in her mouth.

* * *

He dies, and the pain is like something swelling within her, something that needs to be lanced and released. She thinks of the letters they sent each other, when he was in Midhurst and again in Newcastle. She still has them all, all of his and all of hers and all of the ones they sent at different times afterwards, all of the little notes. She might take them out, might read them, but the thought of seeing his handwriting, of catching his scent off the paper, makes her eyes mist.

She'll never smell it off his collar again, the hint of sandalwood and bergamot, and sometimes, incongruously, roses.

He always liked to pick her flowers.

(Why is he dead?)

* * *

The first bit she writes is the day he proposed to her, barely awake after the operation that almost killed him, that saved his life. She remembers every detail of it, of his face ashen-pale and his eyes barely open, and how his lips twitched when she whispered yes and she remembers as he slept as she kissed every inch of his face and swore her love to him with words she had never used before, with words she could never use before.

She remembers how frightening it was, when he almost died afterwards, and her pen trembles as she writes it, just a few words, just to set it down. The worst days of her life but they happened and they got through them, and they are as much a part of their story as the best days.

* * *

He was so proud, the day Robert was accepted into Trinity. Even prouder, the day they saw him graduate with his degree in philosophy. And after they all went to dinner, after Robert went out with his friends, he took her in his arms and held her and there was no need for either of them to speak.

* * *

She writes of Dublin in the '30s. Writes of meeting the handsomest man she had ever seen in her life, and the way he smiled at her and asked her to dance, and the coincidence, the sheer luck of it, that it was the afterparty he went to that night, and found her, and not to the Boat Club dance down the street.

In another world they would never have met.

In another world she would have lost him.

In this world she _has_ lost him, and the pain lances clear through her chest.

* * *

He spent January 1948 in Dublin, standing on the backs of trucks, lending his name and his voice and the air of his frail lungs (one lung, by then) to Browne's name. Every day he would head off early, every night he would be back late, and Robert was so small, so tiny, only a few months old, but sometimes she would pass him off to Christine (and Christine was all too willing to look after him) and go with Philippe to Dublin, not wanting to be too far away from him, not wanting to sit at home and think of him damaging his chest, think of him losing his breath, think of him bringing his illness back. And there would be tears in her eyes to see him standing up there, gesturing forcefully, laying out the injustices of the system, laying out the problems of TB, his story written for all the world to see, but it was worth it, every moment of it was worth it in the end, and on the night Browne was elected, Philippe pulled her into his arms there in the count centre and kissed her soundly, his eyes burning blue as the noon sky as he whispered, "thank you for letting me help him."

(He belonged to the world just as much as he belonged to her. She always knew she could never keep him.)

(Why could they not have had longer?)

* * *

It was early September when he died (the third, and she will always remember it now, remember it without ever thinking of it, the shape of it engraved on her heart) and it is late September (the twenty-fifth) the air just a little frosty, just a little damp, when she finally goes to visit him for the first time since the funeral.

It does not feel any more real now, looking down at that disturbed earth, that name on the temporary marker.

How could it ever be real?

* * *

Robert visits her every weekend, and it is painful to see him, painful to see how like his father he is, his hair combed back the same way, the same bearing, the same height, and in certain lights his features are just the same too, the chiselled nose and strong jaw and the light hits him and for a moment it is Dublin in 1938 and Philippe is about to ask her dance, but then the world tilts back into place and it is 1970 and Philippe is dead and this is Robert, their Robert, their precious boy all grown up.

(Twenty-two does not feel grown up, twenty-two, looking at him, feels like so much a boy.)

"They want to make a documentary," he says, and the eyes are the difference, the eyes have always been the difference between her husband and her son, Philippe's so blue and stern, Robert's a soft brown, and when she sees the eyes there is no mistaking that Philippe is gone.

* * *

She writes about him writing, how he would sit and look out at the sea, his heavy coat wrapped tight around him. How he would tap his fingers on the edge of the desk, how he would sit at just the slightest angle, a habit he acquired in his illness and never lost, how he always wrote everything in long hand and his handwriting was despicable and barely legible but it was the loveliest writing in the world. How his glasses were perched on his nose just so and how sometimes he would stand to consult one of the books on his shelves and how he never played the radio when he was writing, but he always had his phonograph set up, and she knew things were going well when soft jazz wended its way from his study.

She does not write about the photographs he kept on his desk, all the ones of her in all the different years and the photograph they had taken in London, after he left the hospital, and he was so frail but he was smiling so brightly, and her own smile is bright and slightly edged, and it is the closest thing in the world they have to a wedding photograph.

(They went dancing afterwards, and he was still terribly breathless, but he held her close and they swayed to the music and they laughed to think they could be there, laughed and cried to think they would ever see this day.)

(She does not write of her favourite photograph of him, a black-and-white publicity still taken in 1964, at just a slight angle, his face stern and faintly imperious, eyes as if they hold all the secrets of the world, and how she has had to put it facedown, because she cannot bear to meet that gaze now.)

* * *

His hair would glow auburn with the autumn setting sun, his skin cast faintly gold in its rays, and she called him a demigod and kissed the corner of his mouth and he grinned and swooped her into his arms and it was 1957 and faintly indecent that a man who had once been so ill could still dare to do such things with only one lung to his name, and he lay her down on their blanket and kissed her breathless.

(His eyes were blue, but she is already losing their precise shade.)

* * *

She agrees to the documentary, but she will not be in it. She doesn't think she could face it, but Robert will be, and he will look so much like his father, and they're already making a documentary on Browne but it was Raoul's suggestion that he be in Philippe's as well, and he agreed.

She understands little of archives or television making, but she knows Christine has contacts, knows they have been digging out archived footage, news reels and bits Philippe did for the BBC, and she is glad they they are making it, she is, but she doesn't think she can bear to watch it, when the time comes.

To see him on the screen, moving, and laughing, and talking, as if he were still living, as if he might come in, and take her by the hand, and ask her what she's crying for.

(She hears his voice every day, the echo of it in her head, feels his fingertips on the back of her hand.)

She writes that down too.

* * *

She's not even sure what she's writing for. It does not make anything feel better, does not make the hollow inside her contract. All of these memories, laid out on paper, as if they were only ever stories, only ever meant for other people's eyes.

* * *

He would go for walks every day, and sometimes bring his notebook to sketch lines for his latest project as they came to him, and every time he came back he would have something for her — flowers that she has kept, pressed into journals, colorful shells, pieces of shale, pretty little pebbles, feathers, maybe one perfect leaf, dropped to the ground by a careless tree. So many tiny little gifts, so much detritus in the eyes of other people, but to him always something beautiful, and she kept them all, and keeps them still, though she cannot bear to look at them.

* * *

He would whisper to her in French, in Latin. In traces of Italian and the Irish he learned when they summered in the Connemara Gaeltacht in 1967, and though she might not always understand him, the gentleness of his hands, the warmth of his breath on her skin, told her all she needed to know.

* * *

She wonders, sometimes, if he knew. If he knew it would be that night, if he knew he would not see another morning. He arrived home from a meeting in Dublin, and they had a simple dinner, and afterwards he spent a little while in his office, before he came out and wound up the ancient phonograph in the sitting room, and with a softly crackling fire they danced there, slowly, gently, to Nat King Cole's 'Stardust', to Orch Bea Wain singing 'You Go To My Head' like they did in London in 1942, and he kissed her and told her he loved her, and it was on the tip of her tongue to shush him, tip of her tongue to tell him to hold the words, because to say them sometimes has been like an admittance of what can go wrong, but she didn't shush him, and he told her, told her three times, pressing kisses to her forehead and her eyes and her lips and she let him, and whispered the words back to him, and they stood there in the light of the fire holding each other, just holding each other, the music dying slow, whispering these words that always felt like a confession, and afterwards they lay in the darkness, in the quiet softness of their bed, and held each other, and didn't say much of anything at all, and with her fingertips she could feel his heartbeat steady in his throat, and he lay with his head pressed to her chest, as she carded her fingers through his curls.

(Would it have been easier if he had been ill? If he had not been well? He was tired, but he was not truly ill since the streptomycin saved him in 1952, and would it have been easier if he had died then?)

(She cannot bear to think of it, to countenance a world where he did not see Robert grow up.)

* * *

She writes of how she met him, writes of how she loved him. Writes of Midhurst and London and the year he was in Newcastle and Robert. Writes of politics and the way he decided whatever Browne felt was probably the most sensible of it all, and how he said count centers were the best place a writer could ever find himself. Writes of how he loved music and he loved poetry and he loved art and loved the sea and loved most of all to watch her dance. Writes of how he would get up with the sun to see the sky salmon pink, and how he taught her the stars and taught them to Robert and how proud he always was of Raoul and how he never believed in fighting, never believed in war. Writes of how he never held any resentment towards his titled grandfather who married a Catholic and gave up his land and nobility for the sake of love, but how he respected the man more for having done it.

She writes of how he told her she was the best thing that ever happened to him, and how he would kiss her every night, and how the last thing he told her was that the next day would be lovely, and they'd go for a walk on the beach, and watch the birds.

* * *

She has never been a writer but it is a fever of writing and it spills everything from deep inside of her even as the pain is still just as keen, her throat just as tight, even as she longs just as much to have him back in her arms. To hold him, just one last time.

* * *

It is Robert who tells her she should think of publishing it all, one evening in late November, seeing her stack of papers on the table, all neatly typed. She went into Philippe's study to use his typewriter, caressed the keys that still remembered the press of his fingers, and in one of the drawers of his desk as she looked for fresh ink she found a neat stack of letters, all tied with a ribbon, addressed to her.

The last one was written the day before he died.

She can't read them, not yet. If she reads them she will go to pieces.

But Robert tells her she should publish her book, because it is a book though she never intended to write one, and it is Browne, when he comes to visit before filming his part for the documentary, that suggests the title.

_To the Marriage of True Minds._

116 was always Philippe's favourite sonnet.

This time, around the pain in her chest, she manages a smile.

* * *

**A/N: This story exists because in the last two months I have come across the works of three separate Irish women, who wrote about their late husbands. Two books — _Thanks for the tea Mrs Browne_ by Phyllis Browne about her relationship with her doctor-politician husband, Noël (who features here), _Skeff_ by Andrée Sheehy Skeffington, the (as far as I know) definitive biography of her academic-husband Owen, and 'The investment in education report 1965 – recollections and reminiscences' by Áine Hyland about her work on the Investment in Education report and how she met her statistician husband, Bill. Of these three women Phyllis was the greatest inspiration — she explicitly stated she wrote her book as a way to deal with the grief of losing the man she had loved for 60 years.**

**The February 1948 saw Noël Browne being elected to the Dáil — mostly on a platform of improving TB services — and on his first day as a TD he became Minister for Health, at the age of just 32. The description of campaigning on the backs of milk trucks is quite accurate.**

**There was a televised documentary about him in December 1970, a clip of which is accessible on the RTÉ Archive site, and which was the reason for the setting of this fic.**


End file.
